Pathfinding — Q’s from Eric Meyer

This is a thing I’ve been trying to figure out in my spare time, mostly noodling about in my head with various ideas when I have some down time, and now I want to know if there’s a formal answer of some sort. It goes like this: in a lot of situations, ranging from airplane…

The comments section is fairly informative on this question posed by Eric. There are algorithms for pathfinding, but it sounded like Eric wanted something like paths for things in motion. He emphasized what if you cannot stop and change direction point-to-point? One answer mentioned using smaller parts to help define what parts of a path are point-to-point, and which parts approximate a bezier curve with smoothness in between points. I’d say that was closer to how typical objects move even in a plane of 2 dimensions, because of speed and momentum. People, balls, bullets will always follow a somewhat bezier like curve. You just have to move the “handles” to approximate the magnitudes and directions.